FILM REVIEW: YOU CAN'T SPELL "INCEPTION" WITHOUT
"I-N-E-P-T"

By Antoine du Rocher

NEW YORK, 23 JULY 2010  In Gosford Park (2001), Robert
Altman's stylish evocation of the British Upper Class, Hollywood film
producer Morris Weissman (Bob Balaban), a short, self-important,
culturally tone-deaf, gay American, who produces Charlie Chan mystery
movies, gamely describes his latest project, Charlie Chan in
London during dinner at a shooting weekend at a country estate.
When Mr. Weissman declines to reveal how the film ends, suggesting that he
would not want to spoil it for the other dinner guests. Constance,
Countess of Trentham (Maggie Smith) quips, without missing a beat, "Oh,
none of us will see it."

While manifestly a withering insult to the oblivious Mr. Weissman, it
just might be the appropriate snub for this year's much ballyhooed summer
blockbuster, Inception.

A science fiction thriller of staggering pretension and awfulness
(think Angels and Demons on designer steroids),
Inception tells the improbable tale of Dom Cobb (Leonardo
DiCaprio), a consummate thief in the creepy art of extraction: stealing
valuable secrets from other people's minds by surreptitiously slipping
into their dreams. Cobb's rare ability has made him a coveted player in
this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made
him an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved,
notably his late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) and two surviving
children (Les Fleurs du Mal) in America. One last,
highly-lucrative job could give him his life back but only if he can
accomplish the impossible  inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb
and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse; their task,
should they accept (à la Mission Impossible), is not to steal an
idea but to plant one. "This tape will self-destruct in five seconds".
Pitifully, Inception self-destructs in less time than that.

The extraordinary sophistication and weightlessness required to
convince a well-informed movie audience of this conceit is simply beyond
the craftsmanship of those involved. Neither director (Christopher Nolan),
nor actors manage to dominate the badly written material, much less create
the necessary suspension of dis-belief needed to conjure the utterly
fantastic for two and a half hours. Clearly, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ken
Watanabe, both gifted artists, but miscast in this inglorious affair,
don't believe a word of what they are saying. The dialogue is simply too
ludicrous.

The female characters are of little or no interest and plagued by
inaccurate cultural references such as architecture prodigy,
Ariadane (Ellen Page), more of a mournful little nymph than the Mistress
of the Labyrinth as her name would suggest, who, incidentally, flashes a
gold and crocodile Cartier wrist watch as a very young architecture
student at the "collège" in Paris. In France, a collège
is a middle school for pubescent children, not a faculté at a
university. If the filmmakers are alluding to the prestigious Collège de France in Paris,
this is a free, public institution where distinguished French scholars of
the humanities, applied and social sciences dispense year-long univerisity
level seminars for non-matriculating public auditors; it is not a
degree-granting school of architecture. Be that as it may, well brought up
girls of the French bourgeoisie are unlikely to wear such visible signs of
wealth or luxury as students unless they are the daughters of rich
foreigners, notably Middle Easterners, or the mistress of a much older
man. In either case, peu fréquentable.

Despite the significance of urban architecture as metaphor for human
dream construction, Tokyo, Los Angeles and especially Paris have been
reduced to little more than banal opera sets for the film's aesthetic,
social and intellectual posturing. The irony here is that the city of
Molière was not only the birthplace of symbolism (Baudelaire, Mallarmé,
Verlaine) and surrealism, but in more recent times a hot bed of polemical
critique over la science onirique (dream science) where organic
chemists and budding neuroscientists matched wits with eminent research
physicians such as Michel Jolivet, controversial psychoanalysts such as
Jacques Lacan or the brilliant philosopher Michel Foucault (who held
a chair at the Collège de France) over concepts such as le génie
onirique, and la structure nocturne. Instead, one is treated
to a confusing, at times risible cocktail of pseudo physics and psycho
babble between Mr. DiCaprio, his mentor (Michael Caine) and a dicey, but
presumably ingenious Mombassa-based psycho-pharmacologist (Dileep Rao)
cast and played to sterotype by a young south Asian (in scenes beautifully
shot in the narrow alleyways of the Grand Souk in Tangiers, Morocco). Soon
after, when the film attempts to speculate about death and the Mediaeval
Christian, specially Roman Catholic, belief of limbo, one shudders at
the shallowness of thought.

In matters of conception and visual art, so much of this film
is blatantly derivative, referencing earlier and vastly
superior works in this genre such as Blade Runner (1982) and
Black Rain (1989) or Grade B cult science fiction films such as
Flatliners (1990), Altered States (1980) and
Forbidden Planet (1956), where the "monsters from the
id" of a highly intelligent alien race, the Krell, and their
IQ-boosting technology, eventually bring their species to extinction in a
single night; or even Fred Astaire's mesmerizing elegance in
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1951 comedy Royal Wedding where he,
free from the confines of gravity, is seen to dance on a hotel room's
floor, walls and ceiling. The illusion is flawless and a far cry from the
heavy-footed effects of Inception.

So, no matter what the trailer and Internet hype promise,
Inception is hardly more than the standard Hollywood scherzo
about money, power, redemption and showing off. The layering of historical
images of myth and allegory, as shown in the film, is badly constructed
and the Eureka strategy of mirroring i.e., the dream within the dream 
functions less as a framing narrative and more as a stage for a vulgar
barrage of gratuitous visual violence, special effects and bad
music.

On that note, Hans
Zimmer's brutal and deafening score is mostly Fascist industrial dead
weight stitched together with a soupçon of Goldfinger and The
Omen. An otherwise talented film composer (Gladiator, Mission Impossible 2, The Thin
Red Line, Driving Miss Daisy), surely Mr. Zimmer could have sought
inspiration from better sources such as Hungarian composer György Kurtag's
Grabstein für Stephan (Gravestone for Stephen) (1989), a rich,
dark work scored for spaced groups of keyboards, tuned percussions, gongs,
football supporters' alarm signals and whistles, reeds and brass, and low
strings, all positioned around a solo guitar, or Kurtag's equally
compelling Stele (1994), a perfectly chilling three-movement
funeral symphony. In a pinch, the German composer could have considered
the Royal Drummers of Burundi. Instead, Mr. Zimmer and IMAX technology
seek to obliterate the human ear-drum with the relentless poundings of
trite symphonic techno- trivialities.